(ISF) Is del.icio.us the new Slashdot?

(A version of this item - with live links - is available at
<http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog/_archives/2006/8/23/2258323.html>.)

Dear ISF Colleagues,

On August 17th, my blog suddenly started receiving an amazing number
of hits; its intense popularity lasted a couple of hours.

When I looked at the web analytics, I saw that readers were surfing in
from the front page of del.icio.us, because an article of mine ("What
do small nonprofits need to know about fundraising for technology?")
was featured on the del.icio.us hotlist. I was pretty flattered,
because the hotlist usually features web pages that have been
bookmarked by thousands of del.icio.us users, while my article has
only been bookmarked 64 times as of this writing.

All of this extra traffic inspired me to think about the Slashdot
Effect, which is a crash or malfunction that occurs when a link is
featured on Slashdot web site and becomes so popular that reader
demand far exceeds the web server's capacity. Thanks to my blog
host, Tucows, I had no such difficulties. But now I'm wondering
whether in the future we'll be speaking of web sites that are
";delicioused," just as we now refer to web sites that are
";slashdotted."

Best regards from Deborah

Deborah Elizabeth Finn
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
deborah_elizabeth_finnpost.harvard.edu
www.cyber-yenta.org

I think the del.icio.us hotlist factors in more than just number of links - it's also the short time span in which numerous links might occur. Since your blog posts are announced in this forum, and show up in NPTech feeds (such as nptech.krazy.com), there is a likelihood that your popular entries are being rapidly bookmarked, thus grabbing the del.icio.us spotlight. I always tell people that, if they think blogs are just online journals, then they're like the proverbial blind person describing the elephant. What's really amazing about the blogging community is that it's a group of people who are motivated by message and medium, not money, so they come up with powerful, creative and free ways to broadcast the messages. You, Deborah, are one of the most powerful examples of this that I can point to.

--
Peter Campbell * http://blog.krazy.com

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